The College Fix

University says there’s been a ‘trend of issues regarding Guide attendance and tour consistency’

The leaders of a student tour guide service at the University of Virginia have decided to start giving historic campus tours again after their group was suspended earlier this year.

The University Guide Service will return to offering both historic and admissions tours in the spring “independent of the University,” a Dec. 4 announcement states on its website.

Students Davis Taliaferro, Jack Giese, and Ella Sher also announced their return in a recent op-ed for The Cavalier Daily, UVA’s student newspaper.

“As the leaders of the University Guide Service, we believe that student-led tours are integral to the process of telling the University’s history and that our suspension has only caused harm to both the organization and the University writ large,” the op-ed read.

The public institution suspended the group’s tours at the beginning of the fall semester after alumni accused them of pushing an “inflammatory” “political agenda” in their historic tours.

However, the group only has the university’s approval to resume admissions tours in the spring, according to a statement UVA spokesperson Bethanie Glover provided to The College Fix in a recent email.

Student tour guides who have completed a “performance improvement plan … will resume providing admission tours after the winter break,” according to the university.

“The performance improvement process for admission tours was designed to address a trend of issues regarding Guide attendance and tour consistency,” the statement read.

In regard to the historic tours, the students are “free to resume [them] as individuals, separate from the Guide Service agreement and name,” the university stated.

Meanwhile, UVA “will continue to work closely with Guide Service leadership to find the best way forward for both tour options,” the university stated.

MORE: ‘Woke’ tour guide service put on hold at UVA

It continued, “The decision to pause the … UVA history tours centers on the institution’s desire to work with historians, students and others in our community to develop a holistic, self-guided UVA history tour that honestly, fully and consistently engages with our school’s history — both the difficult and the uplifting stories.”

“During this period, we have invited members of the University Guide Service to help the University create the self-guided history tour and a related framework that would support the Guide Service in preparing and delivering in-person tours,” it stated.

The university also is planning to release a “pilot self-guided UVA history tour” in “brochure format” early next semester to stand in for a “comprehensive, self-guided audio or online” tour that would debut next fall.

The Fix reached out to Guide Service co-chair Davis Taliaferro by email several times for comment, but did not receive a response.

In their recent op-ed, Taliaferro and other guide leaders pushed back on the critics of their historic tours, describing them as “anti-history” and a “loud minority.”

“… we search for comprehensive historical understandings through in-person, open conversation with guests. Shutting down these tours stifles open discourse in a way that damages the contemporary community and the act of producing, contesting and engaging with history,” they wrote.

The university’s desire to maintain “a positive image … often conflicts with the University’s goal of telling an authentic history, a tension that ultimately caused administrators to enact this unfounded suspension,” they wrote.

However, the Jefferson Council has expressed concerns for years about the University Guide Service pushing woke politics in its historic campus tours.

The alumni group accused the guides of “hat[ing] UVA” and pushing “woke-ism” through their tours, and took credit for the group’s suspension in the fall, The Fix previously reported.

One of its biggest concerns is the guides’ portrayal of UVA founder Thomas Jefferson.

The guide service website includes a historical tour training document that focuses heavily on the university’s history of slavery.

Another part describing Jefferson’s public education beliefs emphasizes that women and African Americans were excluded. It states, “Though integral to sustaining the operation of the University, women and African Americans were not included in the original vision for a universal public education system.”

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IMAGE: University of Virginia/Facebook

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